Hermesmyth Internet Marketing Blog

Now one of the biggest challenges that this age brings us is the constraint of time and of course global resource usage and its impact on the environment. Online shopping in its own way can positively impact both these problems.

There are many prejudices against online shopping on the lines of unsafe fiscal transactions, inadequate information about the product and the lack of opportunity to actually view the product. But the perks are more than evident. The time saved in travel, the effort saved in actually physically going across the shops and the possibility of getting a good review before the purchase.

Today, most successful products sold on the internet are that ones that do not require a great shopping experience, or the essentials.. Like computer parts, software etc. on the other hand people would much rather buy cloths after they wear it once, would not prefer to shop for it on the internet. But this scenario is soon to change with the invent of ways to make the shopping experience better with video, audio and other multimedia effects on the internet. It is interesting to note that there are places where people buy cars on the internet these days.

On the other hand, sectors like grocery stores etc are fast adapting to the internet revolution. It is possible in most parts of the world these days to buy products on the internet.

Like mentioned before time is a premium for everyone. Both the shopper and the seller save a lot of time when It comes to online shopping. All the host has to do is to set up a clean website and a good payment portal, the buyer come in and do their bit. On the other hand the buyer can shop at leisure with his computer where ever he wants. It’s a win-win situation.

Considering the money saved and betterment in shopping experience, online shopping is here to stay for some time to come.

Most organisations send promotional emails to sell and promote their brand. Do they  really know how many people have really read their email and have visited their website?  75% of the organisations don’t know how many visitors have visted the website after a email campaign.

Here is a simple online tool by Google, which makes your task easy by showing the click throughs in your google analytics account. All you have do is just tag your url providing a campaign name which would be shown in analytics once someone visits your website through email campaign.

Visit: Google Analytics URL Builder for URL Tagging

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

For More Information Visit: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55518

Soon will make a new post regarding the traditional method of tracking open rates while doing email campaigns.

Many of you if not having a website, would surely use a blog either Blogger or Wordpress. You may be posting lot of good articles, but still you may not see your blog listed in any of the first 10 pages of your favourite search engine.  Are you really interested in bringing your blog within those first 10 or 5 pages or even to the first page, then follow the below simple web blog optimization tips.

1.      Choose a domain / blog name (With a keyword, else if you want you to have general name then go ahead and follow the below optimization points – a domain name with a keyword is an add-on to seo technique.)

2.      Have a theme / template that is really pleasing to the eyes. There are lot of free templates available, use them

3.      Checkout for a good and reliable webhosting provider. Also if you use a wordpress or blogger for blogging, they can you their self-hosting.

4.      Avoid overloading the widgets in your blog, it will slow down the web page ie. It will take long time to open the blog itself.

5.      Provide a Descriptive Title with right keywords in it. Title should not be more longer.

6.      Use original content, do not copy somebody’s content and post it in your blog, it will be duplication and your site won’t rank at the top.

7.      Permalinks – while give the links for the post, use the month / date and title of the blog. And again in wordpress you have an option to edit the link itself. Say if you have a got link as “blog.com/november/26/Web-Blog-Optimization-Tips-and-Techniques-for-all-blog-beginners.php “ you can make that as “blog.com/November/26/blog-optimization-tips.php”

8.      Make use of the RSS feeds. Submit the feed links to RSS feed reader sites, this will help your content travel. Customize your feed content like only first 2 paragraphs appears and there is a option to read more which brings the feed readers to your blog.

9.      Submit your blog to web directories and search engines.

10.     Keep posting and updating your blog regularly

11.     Use descriptive and relevant keywords in the tags. The tag clouds will help in bringing visitors when indexed by search engines.

12.     Keep submitting your blog links to social networking sites like digg, delicious, stumpleupon , technorati and many more

13.     If available install some seo supported plugins in your blog. Also when there is newer version of blog available upgrade it.

14.     Add social media websites icon in the footer of the blog to share your posting in social networking sites.  You can do this by visiting www.addthis.com register and add the code provided in the template footer.

15.     Keep you blog interesting and precise. (This is a pretty long post for me….but thought this would be a great interest to my readers )

16.     Keep reading the latest Search Engine optimization (SEO) techniques and follow them

Submit your press releases for free

1. Title Tags – Give higher importance to title tags hence 9.8/10 importance is given to Page Title by Search Engines.

2. URL Structure – Build a short keyword optimistic page link with relevance

3. Content – Content is like a king in Search Engine Optimization. A good content with right keywords and relevancy would bring good results. Include your targeted keyword in H1, H2 and H3 Tags

4. Internal Linking & Navigation – Provide proper and right anchor texts. Anchor Texts also is an important attribute in on-page optimization, which helps the visitor to navigate throughout the website.

5. Dead Links – Have a periodic check on the broken links and redirect them to the relevant urls. More the number of broken links can also affect the search results and ranks.

web directories

Christmas Season has started, and there is a long Q in the ATM’s to withdraw money and spend it for shopping. As this is a season of Christmas shopping, most of sellers provide attractive offers both offline and online. When it comes to offline shopping, you go pick up the product pay for it and come back happily.  But wonder some people in order to avoid over crowded places, start shopping online, and also gift their beloved ones with gifts that would be delivered at their door steps. But the question is how do you trust an online shopping site?

Many of the business sites who sell products using a ecommerce shopping cart with lot of attractive colours , festive offers and special discounts, but still do you thing the conversion rates are high.  Do you think that they are really turning visitors into buyers?  The answer would be “NO” until and unless the visitors trust that the site is a genuine one and really have got its market presence.

What should online shopping cart provider do to gain user’s trust?

Whenever, a shopping cart or any confidential details such credit card information, passwords etc are going to be taken from  the website visitor, in order to gain the trust of the customer, the online shopping service provider should have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certification from any of the Certification Authorities. Eg. VeriSign, Comodo, Geotrust are leading certification authorities. Once the business is validated, the SSL certificate would be issued for the specified domain name, where the shopping cart is placed. This certification is mostly used by online banking sites, registration sites, shopping sites and other ecommerce related websites.

How will a user identify, if a site is secure and safe for shopping?

Generally websites start with the pre-text as http:// whereas when an SSL certificate is there it would begin with https://. Also a golden pad lock (lock image) would be found in the browser. When a website visitor clicks the padlock, he can see the certification details and know whether the certificate is issued to domain where the visitor is going to shop, the validity of certificate etc.

Having this point in my mind, I thought this blog post would be useful for new shopping cart builders and in the meantime would create awareness to a customer of about how to identify a secure online shopping website.

Thought that the below links would be useful for you in getting the right keywords and generating the meta tags.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tools

 http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

 https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

 http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

 Keyword List Generator

 http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-list/generator.php

 Free Meta Tag Generator

http://www.free-webmaster-tools.com/Meta-Tag-Generator.htm

 Free Meta Tag Builder with Time Interval

http://www.1stsitefree.com/meta_gen.htm

Many of us has come across this  problem while surfing the website such  as 404 Error – The page cannot be displayed error.What are these and why do they occur? Does these affect the search rankings? What needs to be done to avoid these? are few questions which may arise, when you come across such 404 Page Not Found Error.

Generally 404 – Page Not Found error  are termed as “Broken Links”. These broken links occur, when there is a file missing in the root directory of the website, or the actual file name was which was working, has been renamed to something, will show as a broken link.

When it comes to search engine ranking, 404 definitely plays a role in it.  More number of broken links in a website also leads to drop in the  page ranks. For instance,  you would  do link building for certain pages  and have acquired lot of external links, which provides a good value to you site. If you change the file name or remove the file in the web root directory, it would be a 404 error page. So this 404 error would reduce the traffic to the website, and also the chances of page rank drop is expected.

In order avoid such things the  404 – Page not found error webpage needs to be redirected to the right link or the new link, sometimes even to the homepage. These kind of redirects is termed as 301-Redirects.   The redirect script should be wrote in the .htaccess file, which would be available as an hidden file in the website root directory. If that not available, you need to create one.

The  404-error page to a  301-redirect script  is below. This needs to be added to the .htaccess file.

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.your-domain-name.com/ [R=301,L]

The above script is valid for a specific i.e. single re-redirect only.  In case of  you need to redirect any 404 error pages to your home page, then you need to use the below rule.

RewriteRule ^whatever/[^.]+)$ http://www.your-domain-name.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

The above specified redirect script are required in the htacess to make 301 redirections, whereas if you want to redirect a  www.example.com domain to www.example.co.in  then you need to create a  index.html file and add it to the root director of www.example.com. The simple re-direct html script required for that is

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<meta name=”Description” content=”any description regarding your website “>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”1; url=http://www.example.co.in /”>
<title>Example of HTML Re-redirect</title>
</head>
</html>

The above can be done in .htaccess as well.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.co.in/$1 [R=301,L]

The above redirects are also considered more imporant in Search Engine Optimizaiton. Hope this helps. Still have got questions, just post it in comments, we would surely reply you. 

When its comes to Organic Search, it better to have the below number of characters/words to optimize it effectively.

Title Tag: 60 Character or 9 words (Title Tag is most important in SEO, which should have the right focus keywords hence, search engines gives 98% importance to Title Tag)

Keywords Tag: 250 characters or 25 words

Description Tag: 250 characters or 25 words

H1,H2, H3 Tags: Focus Keywords and Key Pharases can be provided, which will help in long tail keyword searches.

Keyword Density in content: Many Say that keyword density is not required, but where still it is good to have some 2 to 3% of keyword density, which makes the search engine crawl and show up the results.

Bear in mind that, Relevancy of keywords is more important while optimizing a website. See that the Title Tag, keyword tag, description tag and the content of the website has got the relevant keywords and key pharases.

Note: Inorder to bring keyword relavancy, don’t stuff the keywords, which may result in adverse/negative results

As said earlier search engine spiders just views website as text. It won’t be able view either the content or html hyper links in a specified webpage which is in the form of Java script, flash player, flash content, image type texts etc. Might be the Search Engine algorithms are coded like that . Soon this may also change. Coming back the point, here is how you can see how the spider looks into a website.

Click this website http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php and type in your url, this shows how the search engine views your website.

If you wish you can type in www.hermesmyth.com to have a look of how the search engines views my internet blog website or if you wish to buy your own domain and hosting space, click the banner below.

Most of the website designers and developers  often concentrate on the design, look and feel, aesthetics of the website, whereas  forget about the name, size and the number  of  images appearing in the webpage. So it’s a must  to optimize the images. There are two types of Graphic Optimization,  one which helps in acheiving high speed website and the other which help in search engine optimization.

1. Optimizing the Image Size ie. Creating a image which is less in size.
 
The graphic/image present in the website should be less in size and more efficient , hence when a website gets downloaded, along with the image also gets downloaded. So if the image size is big, then it would take time for the website to display and also consumes high bandwidth.

Say for example, if a image is 40 KB, it would take some time to get downloaded, instead if it is just 4 KB, within a fraction of milli-seconds it would get downloaded, which results in quick display of the web page.

Recommendation:  It’s recommended that the homepage or any other page is less than 200 KB overall and with less than 20 Objects. This would increase the download speed of the website at the same time doesn’t consume more bandwidth.

2. Optimizing the Image Name

When Website Templates are created, it involves writing a style sheet, which may contain some images. It is good to name the images as header_img.gif , body_img_bg.gif etc in case of style sheets to easily understand,  whereas when it comes to products boxes, mangement people images, its good to have the name related that product.

Say for example, if there is an antivirus program boxshot,  you can name the image as “Buy_Antivirus.gif” with an alt text as “Virus protection software” etc. So this would also help the website listed in search engines for keywords like buy antivirus software protection etc. Because all the search engine spiders see only the text and not the image. So its necessary to the image with relevant names which adds value to SEO. In case you the an antivirus software as “as.jpg” then as is not going to be listed nor conveys a meaning.

So while creating a website HTML,HTML Images, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)Images, Image names , size , format (recommended is gif, png) ,Javascript, Graphics and multimedia objects should be given importance.

Hope this helps!